On Lacie drives in general

[Mat @ lacie]

Hi Andy,
You never miss an opportunity to share your opinion on LaCie with the rest of us 🙂 We still don

[Clay Walker]

Over the years, I have owned 6 LaCie drives & one CDR/DVDR burner.

4 of these drives were the the blue faced firewire ones. One died about two years ago. I could never tell whether it was the enclosure or the drive. It was 80 GB and not really worth trying to save at the time. The other 3 drives simply have completed projects on them and still function fine.

My biggest problem drive has been my 500 GB Big Disk. It’s power supply (I think) has always been a bit problematic. It powers on and off while using it. I traveled around last fall doing the “Honda Civic Live” tour and thought each weekend that I set up that it would be last time it would power on…

It’s out of warranty and I don’t use it any more. I was never fond of the proprietary power supply cable with the D2 enclosures. It never seemed to fit well and I could never tell what was enough / too much force when plugging it in.

I have switched completely to SATA drives for the road and I have had no issues with the Kano Enclosures that I have been using.

[Andy Edwards]

Hi Mat,

[Mat @ LaCie] “We still don

[Ilader]

We have purchased two dozen large external hard drives for backup, Maxtor and LaCie, over the past three years. We have experienced a 25% failure rate during the three-four months each drive was in service. These drives were well cared for, in a cool environment, with good power sources. We had no failures of the many computers in the same machine room. None of the drives had a fan, and all felt quite hot. All the drives used similar external power supplies, which also had no fan and felt quite hot. We found that sometimes using a different power supply would “revive” a drive. Those couple of “better” power supplies became our standard supplies, and we have had no failures in the eight months since.

I find it insulting that vendors and manufacturers claim that these drives have a low failure rate. It also makes me worry that they are not working hard to make them more reliable. After all, I don’t care about the past failures, I just need reliable external backup drives for the future. What I’d like to hear from some manufacturer is that they’ve figured out all the reliability problems, and have fixed them in their new model, as proved by their new extended warrantee. They’d get my business, even though long warrantees are no use to me – the drives are only in service a few months before being stored.